Abstract
Lenneberg’s Views on Language Development and Evolution and Their Relevance for Modern Biolinguistics
Highlights
Among the early pioneers of the biolinguistic enterprise, the names of Noam Chomsky and Eric Lenneberg stand out
From its inception Generative Grammar considered the genotype to be the source of the linguistic form, in much the same way that NeoDarwinism took the genotype to be the source of biological form
Something similar applies to Lenneberg’s view: some of the features that define the essence of language, like phrase-structure or transformations, are linguistic features, they may derive from very ancient capacities
Summary
Among the early pioneers of the biolinguistic enterprise (on which see Jenkins 2000, 2004, and Di Sciullo & Boeckx 2011), the names of Noam Chomsky and Eric Lenneberg stand out. Our aim is to show that Lenneberg’s book has more merits than those usually attributed to it He did not merely call for an explicitly biological approach to the study of human language at a crucial time in the development of cognitive science; he did so with really modern, prescient, ideas and with ‘biological’ intuitions that the new biology is beginning to make standard. The return of preformationism, which for example Mayr (1982: 106) explicitly adheres to: According to Mayr, the development of organisms “is controlled by something preformed, recognized as the genetic program” For those reasons, a strict identification between form and genetic codification was a key premise of Neo-Darwinian thought. The same strategy has been defended by many generative scholars, who have ascribed many constraints, principles, etc., to the genotype.
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